Special Interest Group Chairs and Contact Details
Breanne Casper
casperb@usf.edu
Shana Harris
University of Central Florida
shana.harris@ucf.edu
(407) 823-4963
Shana Harris is a medical anthropologist with over a decade of experience researching drug use and abuse and health politics and practice in Latin America and the United States. Her dissertation and postdoctoral research ethnographically examined the adoption and promotion of harm reduction interventions in Argentina. Her current research focuses on medical travel and the use of a psychedelic called ibogaine for drug treatment in Mexico. Her articles have appeared in several scholarly journals, including Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Human Organization, and Substance Use & Misuse. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida.
Melinda Gonzalez
gonzalez.melly@gmail.com
David (Kofi) Mensah
dm2643@nau.edu
Kristin Hedges, PhD
Grand Valley State University
hedgeskr@gvsu.edu
Kristin Hedges is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Grand Valley State University. Her research interests are linked to gender inequality and health; including HIV/AIDS, infectious disease, reproductive health, juvenile justice, and substance abuse. Her work focuses on structural vulnerability and how local contexts impact health and healing. She conducts research in Kenya and the US.
Deon Claiborne
deon.claiborne@gmail.com
Elisha Oliver
elisha.oliver@okstate.edu
Michael Oldani
Michael.Oldani@cuw.edu
Adrienne Strong
adrienne.strong@ufl.edu
Emily Mendenhall
em1061@georgetown.edu
Lauren Carruth
lcarruth@american.edu
Zhiying Ma
zhiyingma@uchicago.edu
Maija Butters
University of Helsinki
maija.butters@gmail.com
Maija Butters (MA, Cultural Anthropology; PhD, Study of Religion) works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research involves various aspects of death and dying in contemporary Europe, and especially issues related to existential meaning-making at the end of life in postsecular societies. Maija is involved with hospice education in Finland, where she lectures on culturally sensitive patient care at hospitals and medical conferences. She also teaches both within and outside the academy on death cultures and rituals in a range of religious traditions.
Jerome Crowder, Ph.D.
Associate Clinical Professor, Department of Behavioral and Social Science
U.Houston, Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine
JCrowder@UH.edu
Jerome Crowder is a Clinical Professor of Medical and Visual Anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Houston Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine. Before moving to U. Houston in 2020 he was an Associate Professor for nearly a decade in the Institute for the Medical Humanities and John Sealy School of Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, TX. Over the past thirty years his community-driven research in Bolivia, Perú, and Texas has been supported by federal and state sponsored agencies (e.g. AHRQ, NSF, NEH and Humanities Texas) and spans conducting dialogues on patient-centered outcomes, to health care decision making and continuity of care, to the role of photography in ethnographic research and issues of representation. As an anthropologist in medical education, Crowder identifies and incorporates social, cultural, and health disparities issues in his teaching and training of health professionals. His applied work has appeared in journals, books, and museums throughout the Americas. Most recently Crowder is the co-author of Visual Research: A Concise Introduction to Thinking Visually (Routledge, 2024, 2nd ed.), co-editor of Anthropological Data in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2020) and co-editor an issue of Medical Anthropology (2017) on the role of images in medical anthropology research. Crowder has contributed to Martinez & Weidman’s “Anthropology in Medical Education” (2021) and is a co-editor with Martinez and Wentworth’s forth coming “Navigating Anthropological Identities in the Health Sciences”.
Carolyn Smith-Morris, Ph.D., M.Ed., LPC
Professor and Chair (Interim), Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences
O’Donnell School of Public Health, U. Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Carolyn.Smith-Morris@UTSouthwestern.edu
Carolyn Smith-Morris is a medical anthropologist with expertise in chronic and complex illness (particularly diabetes), mixed and collaborative methodologies including community- and home-based participatory research, program evaluation and health services research. She currently serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences in the O’Donnell School of Public Health, UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Carolyn has collaborated with colleagues from Amazonian Kichwa communities in Ecuador, the Gila River (Akimel O’odham) Indian Community of Southern Arizona, Australian Peak Hill Wiradjuri, Mexicans and Mexican immigrants to the U.S., and a number of groups in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. She has contributed critical insights to theories of communal and family-centeredness (NSF funded studies in Mexico and Ecuador), the strategies in neighborhood (place) based stigma (NSF funded study of COVID experience in 2 Dallas neighborhoods), and telehealth (GoogleHealth funded study of diabetes retinopathy screening experience). Carolyn has trained and led collaborative teams in urban, rural, and remote settings and specializes in training and collaboration with community health workers and community research assistants.
She received her B.A. in Anthropology from Emory University, an M.S. in Rehabilitation Services from Florida State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from The University of Arizona. And she publishes to a broad, interdisciplinary audience through journals such as: Social Science & Medicine, Nutrients, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, BMC Health Services Research, Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Nutrients, Societies, and PLOS-One. She has also published 5 books including two single-author ethnographies (Indigenous Communalism by Rutgers U. Press and Diabetes Among the Pima by U. Arizona Press), and three edited volumes (Countering Modernity with César Abadía-Barrero, Routledge Press – English and U. Del Rosario Press – Spanish; Diagnostic Controversy by Routledge Press; and Chronic Conditions, Fluid States with Lenore Manderson, Rutgers U. Press).
Yesmar Oyarzun
yesmaroyarzun@gmail.com
Margarite Whitten
margarite_whitten@brown.edu
Julie Armin
jarmin@arizona.edu
Marieke S. van Eijk, Ph.D.; Co-chair
University of Washington, Seattle
Department of Anthropology
mariev2@uw.edu
Marieke van Eijk is a medical anthropologist and Lecturer in Medical Anthropology and Global Health at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Armed with a cross-cultural approach, in her research and teaching, she examines the political health care economies and the forms of labor they produce that create substantial health burdens and challenge the provision of affordable, quality care. Focusing on hidden labor in health care, her recent project analyzes the work of administrative personnel charged with processing medical bills who labor behind the scenes to overcome the shortcomings of privatized U.S. managed care. Her previous research investigated transgender health care delivery in the United States.
Leyla Koyuncuoglu
LeylaKoyuncuoglu@my.unt.edu